When Willpower Hits a Wall in Today’s Cuba
HAVANA TIMES – Ever since I was little, I’ve been hearing the phrase “where there’s a will, there’s a way.” It has been repeated so often throughout my life that I’ve come to regard it almost as religious dogma. I see it in self-help books, motivational speeches, and even plastered across glitter-decorated social media posts.
According to this theory, success, freedom, and change are a matter of attitude and conviction; all you have to do is set clear goals and push hard enough. But this phrase stops being inspiring and becomes something cruel when a person runs up against reality.
Reality is not a blank canvas on which we can paint with willpower alone. It is shaped by geography, political systems, suffocating economies, and invisible but insurmountable walls.
If I expected my will to determine everything, I would be ignoring the weight of the structures surrounding me. It isn’t fair to make me feel guilty for being unable to fly when my wings were clipped at birth and access to the sky has been closed off to me.
There is an enormous difference between wanting something and needing it. For me, a desire is an aspiration that can be postponed, a goal that makes me smile when I imagine it. A need, on the other hand, is physical and vital. It is a pressure in my chest, a stabbing pain when I think about tomorrow, a knot that cannot be undone with positive thoughts or self-improvement slogans.
The sense of powerlessness becomes overwhelming when the need for a different future ceases to be an abstract longing and becomes as essential as water, food, or oxygen. Time is no longer measured in days but in breaths. When I look around me, I see the life of my fifteen-year-old daughter, her talent and dreams confined within the limits of a place with no way out.
Here, the idea of seeking a new horizon is neither a whim nor an adventure. It is an instinct for survival, the urgent need to find a land where roots are not depleted before they have a chance to blossom.
I put everything I have into it. I knock on doors, crunch the numbers, make plans. I am prepared to leave behind my history, my home, and my belongings just to open a single door—and that door will not budge. Is it because I don’t want it badly enough?
No. I have not lacked discipline, nor do I lack courage. The problem is that the rhetoric of “where there’s a will, there’s a way” is a fallacy created by and for those who live in places where paths are open to them. But those of us who live in Cuba, where options are blocked by isolation, crisis, or systematic control, know very well that willpower alone is not enough.
Living trapped in a place that stifles every impulse is not a personal failure. The anger, exhaustion, and pain caused by this suffocating reality are not signs of weakness; they are the logical response to an unjust reality.
I feel I am being honest with myself by refusing to believe in slogans. I accept that there are barriers beyond the reach of my personal effort, and that does not mean resignation. If anything, it allows me to shed a burden of guilt that does not belong to me, because no one is responsible for the walls that others have built around them.
Of course, effort still matters. The unconditional love I have for those closest to me is the force that drives me, and the search for a dignified future has not lost its meaning. I have not given up in my efforts, but that does not mean I have to embrace simplistic consolations.
Sometimes wanting something is not enough to tear down a wall. Perhaps it can be overcome by climbing it; perhaps someone will reach out a hand and help. But it is not going to magically collapse simply by repeating a phrase. Acknowledging the weight of that truth does not diminish my dignity. If anything, it reminds me of the magnitude of what I am enduring and of what I can achieve on my own.
Read more from Fabiana del Valle’s diary here in Havana Times.